Masterminds of Programming - New from O'Reilly

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Masterminds of Programming - New From O'Reilly
Conversations with Creators of Major Programming Languages

Sebastopol, CA--What does it take to create a programming language? Sir
Tony Hoare, winner of an ACM Turing Award and a Kyoto Award, and a leader
in research into computing algorithms and programming languages for 50
years, wrote in his foreword to "Masterminds of Programming" (O'Reilly, US
$39.99): "There are so many programmers who think they can design a
programming language better than one they are currently using; and there
are so many researchers who believe they can design a programming language
better than any that are in current use. Their beliefs are often
justified, but few of their designs ever leave the designer's bottom
drawer." He adds, "You will not find them represented in this book." 

Indeed, "Masterminds of Programming," edited by Federico Biancuzzi and
Shane Warden, is a collection of exclusive interviews with the creators of
many historic and highly influential programming languages.  Through these
conversations, you'll learn about the processes that led to specific
design decisions, including the goals these creators had in mind, the
trade-offs they had to make, and how their experiences shape our own with
regard to programming today.

Within the book's covers, you'll find fascinating comments such as Bjarne
Stoustrup remarking, "I have never seen a program that could be written
better in C than in C++. I don't think such a program could exist." 

Charles "Chuck" H. Moore, creator of Forth, notes, "I have very little
faith in systems analysts who work top-down. They decide what the problem
is and then they factor it in such a way that it can be very difficult to
implement." 

Larry Wall tells us, "Even in its current, partially implemented form,
Perl 6 is already a spectacularly cool language in many people's opinion,
and when it's done it will, hopefully, be both self-describing and
self-parsing using highly derivable grammars, and thus optimized to evolve
smoothly into any kind of a language we might want 20 years from now."

In addition to Stoustrup, Moore, and Wall, "Masterminds of Programming"
includes interviews with:

- Adin D. Falkoff: APL
- Thomas E. Kurtz: BASIC
- Robin Milner: ML
- Donald D. Chamberlin: SQL
- Alfred Aho, Peter Weinberger, and Brian Kernighan: AWK
- Charles Geschke and John Warnock: PostScript
- Bertrand Meyer: Eiffel
- Brad Cox and Tom Love: Objective-C
- Simon Peyton Jones, Paul Hudak, Philip Wadler, and John Hughes: Haskell
- Guido van Rossum: Python
- Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo and Roberto Ierusalimschy: Lua
- James Gosling: Java
- Grady Booch, Ivar Jacobson, and James Rumbaugh: UML
- Anders Hejlsberg: Delphi inventor and lead developer of C#

In "Masterminds of Programming," you will discover some of the thinking
and steps needed to build a successful language, what makes it popular,
and how to approach the current problems that its programmers are facing.

As Biancuzzi says, "If you are looking for inspiring thoughts regarding
software and programming languages, you will need a highlighter, or maybe
two, because I promise that you will find plenty of them throughout these
pages."

Federico Biancuzzi is a freelance interviewer. His interviews appeared on
publications such as ONLamp.com, LinuxDevCenter.com, SecurityFocus.com,
NewsForge.com, Linux.com, TheRegister.co.uk, ArsTechnica.com, the Polish
print magazine BSD Magazine, and the Italian print magazine Linux&C.

Shane Warden manages Onyx Neon Press, an independent publisher. His areas
of expertise include agile software development, language design, and
virtual machines for dynamic languages. He is also a published novelist.

For more information about the book, including table of contents, index,
author bios, and samples, see:
http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596515171/

Masterminds of Programming
Federico Biancuzzi and Shane Warden
ISBN: 978-0-596-51517-1, 494 pages, US $39.99
order@oreilly.com
1-800-998-9938
1-707-827-7000
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